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Archive for July, 2009

I’ve been really busy over the past few weeks, so haven’t had much time for new blog posts. So I thought I would roll up some related news into one post, as all of the information is about Business Intelligence, data and dashboards.

First, if you are interested in how browser-based dashboards can be used to show a company’s financial data, take a look at Microsoft Investor Central. Here’s a snippet showing what it looks like right now:

If you visit the page you will see it makes heavy use of Silverlight to let you zoom in on and manipulate the charts. Thanks to Patrick Husting for the original heads up on this.

Last week Microsoft made all sorts of announcements about Office 2010. I’ve been taking a look at Excel 2010, and in particular the new data presentation options. It looks like this release will have some worthwhile new Business Intelligence features. As well as Gemini, which will I believe be available as a separate add-in, this will be the first release which will let you create Sparklines, those little word-sized graphics which I first blogged about in 2007.

Finally, I’d like to mention the Guardian Newspaper’s Data Store. This is a fairly unique exercise by a national newspaper to make datasets they have created, frequently to support news stories, publicly available. Most of these can be accessed as Google spreadsheets, also downloaded. As well as being interesting datasets in their own right, they are incredibly useful if you want to populate demonstration dashboards, load sample lists, or create training exercises. You can keep up to date on what they are doing on their blog or on Twitter.